Dear M!: Thanks for not using the spray bottle; hope those bruises on your arm heal quickly.

I don't do well with horror movies. At all. I don't like being scared, and I'm extremely susceptible to the tension of screechy string music and stupid weaponless girls sneaking around abandoned houses by themselves at night with a serial killer on the loose. Frankly, I don't feel one whit sorry about their gruesome, horrible deaths.

Anyway, knowing all this, knowing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation once had me curled up and whimpering on the living room floor while my parents laughed, I lost my mind last night and convinced the Ms to rent The Ring with me.

This is perhaps the scariest movie ever. And I didn't even see the really scary parts, because I was hiding behind a throw pillow, with M3 clutching one hand and M! trying to disengage the other from around his bicep. (If you haven't seen it and want to, stop reading here.) Dude, that creepy, evil girl climbs out of a T.V. She could climb out of your T.V.! Samara knows your telephone number, and in seven days, she'll just scare you right to death! She just wants to keep killing, for no reason at all. I could be next! Thank God we watched the DVD version and not a tape, or I would have been incoherent.

I realize, in the bright light of day, that this isn't very probable. However, at 11:30 p.m. with the wind blowing the trees about threateningly, it seems like it just might happen. Especially when M!, the kid who isn't scared of anything, is babbling a little, and M3 keeps asking if I want to sleep on the couch, like she's going to show me the movie again so she can be free of its curse and I can start scratching my face out of photos.

Next time I go to Blockbuster, I promise I won't laugh when M3 suggests The Carebears Movie II.